LaTeX Beginners Guide

Working with templates

When we start to develop a document, we specify the document class, choose meaningful packages and options, and create a frame for the contents. To repeat these steps for each document would be too laborious.

If we plan to write several documents of the same type, we may create a template. This could be a .tex file containing:

• Declaration of a suitable document class together with a set of meaningful options
• Routinely-used packages and packages which are most eligible for our document type
• A predefined layout for header, footer, and body of the text
• Self-made macros to ease our work
• A framework of sectioning commands, where we fill in the headings and the body text
• Or a framework containing \include or \input commands, for which ...